Silly Little Culinary Annoyances

Yesterday, I learned about how Senegalese salesmen price their goods. It's time forrrrr:
(Click to enlarge)


This Is Africa; we bargain.

So onto the theme of this post. If you’re a student at ALA, and not me, your academic life feels quite similar to what I imagine drinking water from a fire hydrant would be like. And if that weren’t enough, there are a number of other ways that your existence could be made harder, most of them in the dining hall.

If you’re vegetarian, you could suffer from an extreme protein deficiency, curable only by mass ordering margarita pizzas.

Also, apparently the bread is laced with preservatives. Don’t eat it! Actually, there’s no way to survive without it. Go ahead, kill yourselves! I do.

And if you do manage to avoid the bread, you have to have cereal for breakfast, and you’re in trouble then too. Here’s why: At the beginning of the term, we had a lot of small, very shallow bowls, and some big hexagonal ones. Because I enjoyed eating more than three cornflakes per sitting and wasn’t able to find a pipette with which to douse them in milk, I used the big bowls. Then, for no discernable reason, the big bowls vanished! Now, eating cereal is one of the hardest parts of my day. It requires concentration, fine motor skills, and balance.

ALA Guide To Eating Cereal.

1. Fill a bowl with between 10 and 15 Branflakes/Cornflakes, or 3 teaspoons of Rice Krispies.
2. Even them out along the base of your bowl with a plastic spoon.
3. Fill the bowl with milk, very slowly. It is recommended that you actually pour into the milk carton’s cap, and transfer it to the bowl that way. Pause after each capful to inspect potential space for the next one.
4. When the bowl has reached maximum capacity (around 5 capfuls), pick it up and walk gingerly back to your seat. Caution! – if your bowl deviates more than 4˚ from the horizontal, all of your breakfast will be on the floor, and you’ll start to feel a lot like the Danaides.

(The Danaides were forty-nine maidens in Ancient Greek mythology who were condemned to an eternity of trying to fill leaky jugs with water in the underworld after they all killed their husbands.)



Okay so what really happened is that we lived like that for about a week, and then found a workaround (thank you Entrepreneurship class!). We began using separate mugs for cereal and milk. Now we don’t have to eat cereal out of saucers!

Nothing makes life hard for us Americans like the absurdly heavy South African soda cans though. What is going on? A Fanta can in Gauteng is about three times heavier than its US equivalent. Honestly, they might as well have been hand carved from granite, lined with lead, and then given an anchor. Not only are they a waste of good aluminium, but they’re very off-putting. I have been trained to feel how much liquid is left in a can, and an empty South African one feels like it’s about two thirds full to me. The experience of drinking from them is always a huge let down. I’ll be looking forward to that last mouthful of ginger beer, only to tilt the can back and realize that I had it five minutes ago. It’s a lot like seeing a really attractive girl flirting with you on the other side of the street, crossing the street, introducing yourself, and then discovering that despite appearances, she’s actually in her middle ages, and dedicates her entire life to cataloguing and naming her toenail clippings.



South Africa needs lighter soda cans.